NEWS

New Amps

So I know that various people have been posting up their Shadow Amp ideas but thought it might be nice to have a single thread where we could all post our ideas for new amps as a single point resource for those who like/play Anarchy. I'll be posting mine here as I go.

First up is my take on adding drugs to Anarchy. I've taken some artistic licence here, by creating costs to using the drug and having them reduce the final cost of the amp, and have shown how I got to the end result and cost. Feedback would be welcome and if people like my approach I'll stat out some more of the drugs and post them up here in the coming days:

Kamikaze

This combat drug is popular with those who can’t afford implants or who don’t have magic. The effects are impressive, giving someone the power and speed of the augmented, but it does come with drawbacks being both highly addictive and taking a physical toll on the body.

Downsides - only effective for a single scene. At the end of the scene take 3 physical damage, gain Low Pain Tolerance for the next scene and make a hard (vs 10 dice) Strength + Willpower test. Failure means that the drug can’t be used again for this contract unless a plot point is spent to activate it. A glitch means that you are now addicted and must make a hard (vs 10 dice) Strength + Willpower test at the start of each contract. Failure means you must take the drug at the earliest opportunity in the contract or suffer -2 dice to all tests until you do so.

´Wonderful´, the Flatline said,´I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.´ - William Gibson, Neuromancer“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” - William Gibson

So I've now created a spreadsheet that I'm using to collate all of my new Amps in a single location.

I'm also going through the forum posts and adding any that have been put forward by others (fully credited and colour coded in green on the spreadsheet to show they are not my own work) but it is a work in progess.

´Wonderful´, the Flatline said,´I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.´ - William Gibson, Neuromancer“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” - William Gibson

One thing I don't understand is why adding rerolls has the same cost as adding dice. Any clarification on this? It seems like the amps in the book use one or the other with no rhyme or reason, but I'm using the oudatedcopy (hardcopy in mail). Also, what constitutes as an "advanced" effect?

All mechanics have the same cost because the dice pools are smaller, the different mods are capped at 3 each, and they interact with pre-Edge and post-Edge differently.

Reroll vs. Adding dice: One mechanic is not twice as good as the other, so if one cost 1, the other cannot cost 2.

Thematically, adding dice is more about aptitude and power while rerolls are more about accuracy and precision, but they basically do the same thing. I am no math wizard but I think rerolls do better with smaller pools/pre-Edge but dice pool increases do better with larger pools/post-Edge. But don't quote me; i don't care enough to figure it out. I just stick with the theme.

An advanced effect, as far as I understand, is anything that does something other than adding/subtracting dice, rerolls, adding damage, reducing damage, or acting upon the narrative. I would imagine knockdowns, stuns, and other such effects.

Basically rerolls and extra dice are the same as long as enough dice fails to "cover" your reroll capacity. I guess the main reason to differenciate both is to be able to combine both on a single or two amps.

With small dice pools, adding dice has the potential to exceed your ability on very lucky rolls, while rerolls does not. With large dice pools I don't think it matters, because the chance of rolling 100% hits with more than a few dice is minuscule.

Personally, I favor adding dice over rerolling simply because it streamlines play. Since net hits matter in combat, people will always reroll misses, which means two rolls every time. It's less of an issue in skill checks, because if you've hit the threshold then the reroll can be skipped. The other factor is how you're rolling. It's easy to add bonus dice to an auto-roller like in roll20 (say a button that will roll against a skill for you), and very difficult to automatically reroll with one.

If the potential to exceed your skill on a roll is an issue for a particular roll, instead of using rerolls you can just cap the number of hits to ATTR+SKILL in the exceedingly rare event that it happens.

Thanks for the clarification, chums! The main source of my confusion was that the sample amps in the book seemed to follow no pattern and thus made some amps a bit stronger than others since bonus dice is more powerful. Unless I'm mistaken, rerolls are always inferior as there is no pre/post edging but rather a dice steroid on a single roll.

I was confused by the same thing, to the point where I actually emailed the developer to ask about it. The crux of his reply was that they're to serve as examples, and it's really up to you how to build amps. The default for Anarchy is rerolls, but if you prefer adding dice then go for it. There's little mechanical difference, so it mostly comes down to which feels more fun.